Reclaiming Commercial Art, The Periodic Table of Cognition, and Email's Centrality

Aloha, newsletter readers!

This week we released the latest episode of Payroll Around The World, our podcast for ADP, featuring the intricacies of payroll in Poland.

If you’re in the UK, you can join Britain’s Weekend of Hope on October 18th & 19th. Not all news is bad news.

We’re talking to a few folks about the importance of longer-term thought leadership over timed brand campaigns. If you’d like us to tell you more, reach out!

It’s officially the start of the weekend. Pick out your favourites from the 10 links below and have a read!

Anjali

‘Impact Editor’ is A Relatively New Job, And It’s Already Changing (6-min read)

Strat Scraps: Reclaiming Commercial Art (3-minute read)

The Periodic Table of Cognition (7-min read)

The Rebooting Show: Beehiiv’s Tyler Denk on Email’s Centrality (50-min listen)

AI Slop Is Destroying The Internet (12-min watch)

Lost Science: She Studied How Logging Affects Pollinators (3-min read, part of a series)

Instagram Story Likes And Markers Of Digital Affection (10-min read)

Brands Turn To Discord Servers As A Means To Reach Niche Influencer Channels In Their Own Communities (6-min read)

Tape Bowing Ensemble (3-min watch/listen)

Space Exploration Logo Archive (Gallery of logos)

Storythings is the content marketing agency that helps you STAY HUMAN in a sea of marketing slop. If you think you’re at risk of becoming a B2B zombie, we’ve got the antidote. Click the button below for your free guide.

‘Impact Editor’ is A Relatively New Job, And It’s Already Changing (6-min read)
We’ve had an impact producer role at various points in Storythings’ life, and the role is an increasingly important one. How do you quantify impact in a world where access to information is constantly changing? The summary of a conversation between four impact editors at the Incubator for Media Education and Development (IMEDD)’s International Journalism Forum in Athens, Greece, last month, is well worth reading.

Strat Scraps: Reclaiming Commercial Art (3-minute read)
Alex Morris on creative advertising, suggesting we need to bring back the field of Commercial Art: “No constant rounds of review. No CTAs. Just art that has a commercial objective, to make people think of the brand or product positively.” It’s what we’re trying to do with an under-construction project of our own, and as Hugh said, the goal there is similarly to give the audience “tools to make it beautiful because beauty is a promise of happiness.”

The Periodic Table of Cognition (7-min read)
Kevin Kelly uses the early history of electricity’s discovery as a map for our current discovery of artificial intelligence. He used ChatGPT5Pro to generate a periodic table of cognition based on what we know so far about the two. The reason for comparing our understanding of electricity to that of AI, is that we used electricity back in the day to do different things without understanding why they worked, and we’re doing the same thing with AI: “A century ago, our use of electricity ran ahead of our understanding of it. We made motors from magnets and coiled wire without understanding why they worked. Theory lagged behind practice. As with electricity, our employment of intelligence exceeds our understanding of it. We are using LLMs to answer questions or to code software without having a theory of intelligence. A real theory of intelligence is so lacking that we don’t know how our own minds work, let alone the synthetic ones we can now create.”

The Rebooting Show: Beehiiv’s Tyler Denk on Email’s Centrality (50-min listen)
Yes Beehiiv sponsors The Rebooting, and this newsletter is published on Beehiiv, but this conversation about the importance of audience ownership and the role of email as a primary distribution channel is well worth listening to. Amongst other things, Brian Morrissey and Tyler Denk discuss the trends in the newsletter space, the idea of ‘peak email’, and the shift towards niche content and sustainable business models.

AI Slop Is Destroying The Internet (12-min watch)
Kurzgesagt is a YouTube channel that has, over the years, done a pretty decent job of creating explainer videos that are actually engaging to watch. They’ve used themselves as the case study this time, as they enumerate all the ways in which AI is killing good content on the internet, including their own channel. But they still use humans to fact check! So there is hope yet.

Lost Science: She Studied How Logging Affects Pollinators (3-min read, part of a series)
It’s heartbreaking that this series has to exist. The New York Times ‘Lost Science’ is ‘an ongoing series of accounts from scientists who have lost their jobs or funding after cuts by the Trump administration.’ Here, Kim Ballare, previously a research ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service, recounts what she was working on before her federal grant was pulled.

Instagram Story Likes And Markers Of Digital Affection (10-min read)
This article made me yearn for the old days of the internet. Ruby Justice Thelot did some user research on the meaning of Instagram Story likes, by way of Seinfeld and LiveJournal. The conclusion is that it is a love language that has a particular problem - Instagram Story Likes give unclear signals: “The difficulty in interpreting digital interactions is that they are not performed in a fully socialized context. In other words, we are on our phones by ourselves, and, therefore, are not getting the general social feedback about the meaning of our actions.”

Brands Turn To Discord Servers As A Means To Reach Niche Influencer Channels In Their Own Communities (6-min read)
It’s all about dark social. In Digiday, a look at how Discord is pitching to advertisers, with brands increasingly looking to it as an influencer marketing play. In the first link today, I shared how the role of impact editors is changing. For brands, this is a form of impact - ‘the chance to align with a passionate community, to build real affinity and trust’.

Tape Bowing Ensemble (3-min watch/listen)
Via Ted Gioia’s newsletter, a really amazing YouTube video (or you can just listen to it, but you do get something from watching it), of the Open Reel Ensemble making music using magnetic tape and bamboo. Highly recommend! My favourite comment to the video might be “Every once in a while you stumble upon something unexpected and rare on YouTube”.

Space Exploration Logo Archive (Gallery of logos)
Thanks to friend of Storythings Steve Bryant, here’s a gallery of cool space logos. What’s not to love.

Things that happened today, October 10th: in 1969 Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice recorded the ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ soundtrack, and in 1899 Isaac R. Johnson patented the bicycle frame.

That’s it for now. Our new newsletter design should be ready next week, so prepare for a bit of a change!

Matt, Anjali, Hugh and the rest of Team Storythings